The Art of Reading People: Character, Expression, Interpretation

Goals

More specifically, the goals of this unit are threefold. One, I hope to strengthen my emerging readers' ability to draw inferences while reading fiction. I want to name this strategy and guide them in practicing it independently in their reading lives. Two, I hope to make concrete the connection between inferring people's thoughts and feelings in real life and in reading fiction. If I arm students with an awareness of their inclination to infer people's states of mind and the intentions behind their actions and words, then they can begin to confront their frequent misunderstandings of each other. ⁶ Three, I hope to discover, uncover, and explore with my students the nature of their friendships and the ways in which their relationships develop and change as they mature. I hope they will become aware of their ever-changing conceptions of friendship through making connections to and discussing texts. I want to help them navigate the transition between having friendships based on simple, superficial connections to more multi-faceted and significant relationships.

Goal One: Building Skills in Reading

This unit is designed to focus on teaching making inferences as an integral reading skill. Inferring is defined as "deducing or concluding information from evidence and reasoning rather than explicit statements." ⁷ In order to understand a text as a whole, whether it is a picture book or a novel, one needs to be able to make inferences based on dialogue, descriptions, actions, or perhaps illustrations. I will begin this unit with texts in which my students will not need to make many inferences about a character because the author has explicitly described the character's motivations, thoughts, and feelings. We will then move across texts that begin to demand more and more inferential work from the reader. My hope is that by being mindful of this progression, I will be able to scaffold my students' entry into the world of inferring while reading, as they are emerging readers.

Inferring is one of the many comprehension strategies readers depend upon to make meaning during reading. Other comprehension strategies include synthesizing, retelling, monitoring, determining importance, predicting, questioning, envisioning, and making connections. Many of these strategies are interdependent and difficult to teach in isolation. Drawing inferences may be closely related to being able to determine the importance of a part of a text as well as envisioning exactly what is happening in that part. Readers need to be able to put themselves into the text and imagine what it is like to be the character in that specific context in order to infer how the character feels or the intentions behind his/her actions.

Lisa Zunshine argues that part of enjoying reading is reliant upon our successful application of what cognitive scientists describe as humans' well-developed Theory of Mind, as well as our awareness that we are in fact successfully deducing and concluding as we put together clues from the text. Theory of Mind is the set of tacit beliefs and cognitive skills that lead most humans to automatically assume that another person's behavior, physical actions, or facial expressions reflect what he or she is feeling and thinking. Thus, we can "read" an individual's facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, word choice or actions as indicative of internal thoughts and motivations. We call upon our ability to "mind read," as Baron Cohen calls this kind of inferring, to read between the lines when reading fiction. ⁸

Goal Two: Building Social Skills

Even the youngest of students make inferences throughout their daily lives. They are quick to ask you, "Do you feel okay?" or "Why are you so mad?" They pick up on the cues inherent in other people's facial expressions, intonations or body language with ease and use those clues to make conclusions. However, as with many other skills, it is our jobs as teachers to explicitly name and make apparent the usefulness and application of such a skill.

Rubin discusses the skills necessary in navigating conflicts among peers.

The skills of friendship also include the ability to manage conflicts successfully. Children learn that it is often valuable to talk out their hurt feelings in order to restore good will…In order to maintain friendships in the face of the disagreements that inevitably arise, children must learn to express their own rights and feelings clearly while remaining sensitive to the rights and feelings of others. ⁹

I want my students to reach a place where they feel comfortable saying things such as "I think you're mad at me because you haven't talked to me all day. Is that true? Are you mad at me?" And then hopefully they'll have the courage to follow up with "Why are you mad at me?" This process of voicing an assumption about the behavior of a friend allows our friend to affirm or deny our assumptions, as well as offers us a chance to start a transparent conversation. I would argue that too often, as adults, we infer incorrectly the reasons behind another person's behavior and act in response to such assumptions, creating a chain of reactions all based on an incorrect inference. As indicated in the opening scenario, children frequently make the same mistakes.

It is my hope that through providing opportunities to infer intentions from literary characters' words, actions, expressions, I can gently nudge my students away from their egocentrism towards a more empathic frame of mind. If I can encourage them to consider the perspectives of literary characters, then this seems like a logical step towards considering the perspectives of their classmates. If children have differing opinions about the thoughts and feelings of a character, it might also provide us with a chance to discuss just how hard it is to read another person's mind – opening up a conversation about misattribution of intent derived from physical and linguistic cues.

Goal Three: Growing Ideas About Friendship

In my years as a second grade teacher I noticed that many relationships between close friends became strained as my students matured. Throughout the year my students would start to grapple with wanting to have more than one close friend, or to shift who their "best" friend was at various points. These changes caused a lot of tension and hurt feelings within the classroom, and I often paused to consider why this drama kept recurring. My students' cries for help still ring in my ears: "She won't play with me! Why isn't she my friend anymore? I thought I was your best friend?!? He was my best friend, but now he won't let me play." I can't stop these transitions from happening, but I can provide a space within the classroom to discuss the inevitable shifts in friends and their social-emotional impact on my students. If, as a classroom community, we look closely at the friendships portrayed in a group of texts, then perhaps we can grow a few general ideas about friendship from those shared experiences.

Smollar and Youniss write that concepts about friendship develop along three dimensions. The first dimension describes friendship "in terms of ongoing interactions, that is, positive or negative. Becoming a friend involves engaging in a positive activity together." ^{1 0} The second dimension characterizes friendship "by a differentiation of peers into friends and 'not friends,' not on the basis of the qualities of actions, but rather on the qualities of persons." ^{1 1} The third dimension deals with the extent to which the individuals feel "that he or she can exchange personal information." ^{1 2} This meshes well with Rubin's aforementioned theories about the ways in which children develop a deeper conception of "friendship." He notes that "(f)or the young child, the question of what constitutes closeness translates into the question of what distinguishes a best friend from other friends. When such a distinction is made, it is strictly quantitative terms—whatever you do with a friend, you simply do more of it with a best friend." ^{1 3} This characterization of "best friends" is definitely prevalent in first and second-grade mind-sets. And as children try to prove the strength of their bond by simply increasing the amount of time spent together, I often find that these friendships begin to feel strained. These youngsters haven't yet had to reconcile the feeling of wanting time to themselves or time with other people with their perception that best friends do everything together.

There are many series written for young readers that have pairs of main characters that can be characterized as "best friends." For example, Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad and Mo Willems' Elephant and Piggie and James Howe's Houndsley and Catina. These texts will offer us many opportunities to discuss what being "best friends" looks like in each of those relationships throughout a series. Do they all resemble each other in some way? How are the friendships different? Do the relationships between the main characters stay the same throughout the series or develop in complexity? Regardless of the conclusions my students come to through this process, I know that this kind of discussion will allow us to reflect on the nature of our own friendships.